Given the rapid expansion of mobile communications along with the pervasiveness of email and instant messaging, determining the right method or time to contact someone often proves difficult. Many people are associated with numerous telephone numbers associated with fixed and mobile terminals, email addresses, instant messaging identifiers, and the like. Trying to contact such people often leads to leaving one or more voicemails and perhaps sending email or instant messaging messages prior to making contact. Further, trading numerous messages or voicemails prior to finally connecting with one another is commonplace.
Presence systems have been developed to address the difficulty in determining if someone is available to communicate, and perhaps how best to communicate with that person when she is available. In general, presence systems monitor state information from one or more devices or networks associated with a particular person, and process the state information to create presence information bearing on the relative availability of that particular person. The presence information is then sent to those subscribers interested in knowing the relative availability of the particular person. The state information generally bears on a person's physical presence or activity with respect to a certain device.
Unfortunately, the relative availability of a person for communications is often dictated by her location, and in particular, the nature of the location. For example, an office environment has various locations in which communications are both desirable and undesirable. The person may not want to receive communications while they are in a conference room, a superior's office, a restroom, a designated quiet area, or an elevator for any number of reasons. There are other types of locations where receiving communications, or at least certain types of communications, is generally desirable, such as when the person is in her office or in a subordinate's office. Outside of the office, there are locations such as restaurants, theaters, churches, and hospitals where receiving communications, or at least certain types of communications, is also undesirable.
Accordingly, a person's relative availability to receive communications may change from minute to minute based on her location. Although attempts are being made to automate presence tracking, current presence systems are simply unable to readily take into consideration such location-based changes without requiring the person to provide some form of manual input. For example, when a presence system is configured to monitor the state of the person's mobile terminal, the person may need to turn her mobile telephone off when entering a conference room, restaurant, restroom, or the like, and then turn it back on upon leaving. Given the frequency with which the person may enter and leave the various locations, updating the presence system becomes impractical. Such impracticality is unfortunate because the concept of presence-controlled communications is very desirable, yet automation and resolution, especially with respect to location, is necessary to fully take advantage of presence information.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technique to further automate the acquisition of location-based state information to provide an improved system for delivering presence information. There is a further need for a cost effective and efficient technique to automatically determine a person's location and provide location-based state information to a presence system based on the person's location. There is yet a further need to integrate location-based state information with other types of state information to provide an improved presence system.